


An Inquiry and Its Response

by dancerinthedrink



Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Genre: Admiration, Anal Sex, First Time, Light Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, Not Beta Read, Nude Modeling, Oral Sex, Porn with Feelings, Purple Prose, Touching, mostly descriptions of dorian's appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 14:08:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30140733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancerinthedrink/pseuds/dancerinthedrink
Summary: “On behalf of your time and mine, I believe it would be most opportune for the two of us if instead of recreating our anatomical studies I examine you directly. I believe if I can touch you, feel your bones beneath your skin, know your make-up, I’ll be able to understand you far better.”
Relationships: Dorian Gray/Basil Hallward
Kudos: 10





	An Inquiry and Its Response

They had assumed the usual poses: Basil behind his easel, palette around his thumb, and Dorian on the raised platform, passive except for keeping his beauty composed underneath the afternoon light. What luck that Henry had been coerced into attending luncheon with his wife’s mother and father at the Savoy instead of breaking Basil’s concentration with his musings on aesthetic philosophy! Now those are two words that should never go together, Basil thought as he swirled his brush around a tablet of crimson. Sometimes he believed there would be a lot less trouble running about the world if Henry attended fewer dinner parties.

But no matter. He was gifted a rare day alone with Dorian and would not waste it with thoughts of Henry. And what a day. The sunlight fell in shafts through the muslin curtains, dispersing in a misty golden glow, turning his lounge chimerical in its magical haze. The door to the garden had been left open to let the cool breezes of daisy-bright fragrance wind through the legs of the furniture. The chirrups of imported cardinals twinkled distantly, resting on branches of blooming dogwoods like a string of rubies on a white breast and were louder than clopping of horse-drawn omnibuses and hansom cabs which stirred up cyclones of dust in the street. 

A turquoise bowl of glazed faience replete with pink strawberries was seated on the table next to the divan, sliced by the cook in triangles in the same fashion she chopped mushrooms. Basil had sampled them earlier and found them too tart for his liking but was pleased to have seen - tongue smarting, eyes watering - Dorian sneak an extra handful into his pocket to snack on while he posed whenever Basil wasn’t looking, the juice now leaked through his trousers and dribbled down to pool around his shoes.

It was on perfect days like this that Basil adored looking on Dorian most of all, when the spirit of the day matched with the beauty of the boy and the boy himself swayed on weakening legs like a pear blossom in the spring halcyons.

“Perhaps a break, Dorian?” Basil suggested from his easel.

Dorian, lost in some daydream to stave off the ennui of musehood, shook his head. “I’m fine. It’s just…” He trailed off and, pensively, stared at his shoes, at the strawberry-wet puddle beneath their soles, like a pool of blood. “Could we place a call to Lord Henry? He always has such interesting things to say, and he would keep my morale high enough for you to finish your work today. We could all go out to supper together afterward.”

Sighing, Basil reflected on the innocence of his subject. Always so eager to meet with a friend on the basis of what they had to say instead of what their presence meant. “I’m sorry, but Henry is visiting with his wife’s family and should be indisposed until next Wednesday if he decides to play a good husband to Lady Wotton or until tomorrow evening if he believes his task is complete by being an absent host,” Basil said with a touch more bitterness than was necessary. 

Dorian bowed his head slightly. 

“A hair higher, if you please,” Basil continued. He tried to keep his voice from quavering. He hated to bring Dorian sorrow. Despite the melancholy beauty it lent to his expression, and thus the paint, Basil adored the radiance of charm and cheer that came from images of a happy Dorian more fervently than when he captured a Lord of Shalott, bereaved on the languor of lake water. 

Today they were working on a likeness of Narcissus and the treachery of reflections though Dorian had not been put in costume yet which, under normal circumstances, would be no more than a bedsheet. He had questioned Basil on this when he arrived but Basil merely waved his worries away because he, under no conceivable circumstances, could reveal the truth of the matter to Dorian. For, in honesty, last night, as the full moon brought lunacy over the world for a subset of hours, Basil dreamt wickedly of Dorian in his Grecian costume.

In the dream, Dorian was wrapped up in the bedsheet but with every stroke of Basil’s brush, the sheet seemed to slip lower and lower off his shoulders, gradually exposing his collarbone and his satin-soft skin, white as the fabric that had so recently absconded from his body. And the daffodil wreath they had planned to crown him with had been plucked clean. Petals blew about the room like stars in the wind and the center flutes were lonely and naked. 

Not that he needed the floral tiara with hair as yellow as sunlight.

The massacre of the jonquils had been executed through a game of _effeuiller la marguerite_. Dorian had the thin stems in his fingers and was stroking them obscenely. _“He loves me not,”_ he had sighed. He then sat up; the sheet tumbled to disclose what remained of his masculinity. _“Oh, Basil. Prove to me it isn’t true. Prove to me you love me.”_

Basil made love to the boy of his midnight reverie on the parapet where his daylight counterpart now stood! 

When he had awoken that morning, nearly swimming in lust, he considered canceling the whole affair and searching out a companion to satiate his desires with. But ultimately he could not turn down the chance to see Dorian again and thus he stalled and made his excuses because if he had seen Dorian in such a state similar to the one he held in fantasy, he would be unable to resist making a fool of himself and quite probably frightening the boy into a fit.

It was hard to resist him while he tugged at his collar so the peaks of his dastardly sculpted clavicles could be seen. Basil was wild with longing.

“Dorian,” he said, his voice anxious in a creeping falsetto. 

“Yes, Basil?”

“There’s-- Well, there’s something I need to do today.”

“Yes?”

“You see, I am having a bit of trouble with you.”

“With me, Basil?” He sounded fearful.

“Yes. It’s...well… May I approach you?” Basil had propped his palette on the easel ridge and pulled his smock off over his head; it was still wet with paint in some places and Basil didn’t want to stain Dorian’s lovely clothes. 

“If you think it will help,” Dorian said obligingly.

His heart heavy enough to make walking an effort, Basil ascended the platform. With steady hands characteristic of his profession, once he had sidled up to his muse, he reached out and gently stroked along Dorian’s prominent cheekbones. To Basil’s relief, Dorian did not quail or even flinch at his touch so Basil braved forward with his justification. 

“It is very much a painter’s problem, nothing to do with your behaviour, you’ve been perfectly wonderful today, but I am at a dilemma with how to replicate your body. Do you remember when I did that study of you on Friday before last? I had the fruits of the labour in front of me but was simply unable to fathom them together to create our Narcissus in the way that would most honour antiquity. It is a mistake wholly of my own invention. I’m afraid I skimped on the inner details of the body. The bones, the muscles, the inner organs. From my drawings, I have no consideration of where they are ordered beneath your skin.

“So, on behalf of your time and mine, I believe it would be most opportune for the two of us if instead of recreating the sketches I examine you directly. I believe if I can touch you, feel your bones beneath your skin, know your make-up, I’ll be able to understand you far better.”

Dorian nodded slowly. “I suppose that makes sense.” He squared his shoulders, his chin high, presenting himself ready for Basil’s work. “You may begin when ready.”

Basil relaxed and, lightly as a sunbeam, drew the point of his finger in a circle around Dorian’s cheekbone, tracing the shapes of the skull that lay just beneath his skin. Down he swept to the angle of his jaw; his chin, bare of the scrim of facial hair that so many men scraped off before breakfast; the pattern of teeth he could feel just under his lips. 

Then the lips.

Stained just barely by the juice of the berries to a flush colour, like a boy player evoking Desdemona, they were rose petals carried off the bloom by a summer breeze, grown tender in the shade of a dahlia. Basil imagined passing his fingers between his lips then quickly banished the thought as improper and quitted to the cheeks as to avoid temptation.

Dorian closed his eyes. His tongue crossed his lips once Basil had moved on, and he had to mentally restrain himself from returning to feel the drying dew. Dorian’s eyes, hidden like lapis lazuli in the mines of Sar-i Sang, moved dreamlike when Basil had his fingers play over the valley between forehead and cheek. His eyelashes were so dark and long, like a china doll’s, that Basil had heard society women, Lady Wotton especially, speak scornfully of how such natural beauty was wasted on a man when they had to line their eyes with Rimmel’s stuff to get the same length and quality. 

Basil ran his finger down the ramp of Dorian’s nose and felt the chambers inside his perfectly shaped ears. He had Dorian turn his back to him so he could place his hands atop his head. While Basil was no student of phrenology and had little talent in divining a man’s temper on the construction of his skull, he could perceive the empathy and innocence Dorian harboured in secret, curtained by the resplendent blond of his hair.

Dorian let out a soft groan and, fearing the worst, Basil withdrew.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked.

“Quite the opposite,” Dorian said shyly. “I’m enjoying myself. Your hands-- They are very adept. It must be your history as a painter that gives you the skill to handle unconventional materials to winsomeness.”

“If you are referring obliquely to my time turning paint to your likeness on the canvas then I must admonish you. I have no special savvy for art; I am merely in possession of the disposition to coax beauty out from where it hides. And I have the perfect subject on which to conduct my experiments.” Basil slid his hands down from Dorian’s head to the back of his neck. A slender column, straight and white. He circled Dorian’s Adam’s apple lightly, grateful he could not see it otherwise he would be as seduced as Eve to sink his teeth into it. 

Basil stroked the underside of Dorian’s chin and neck with his knuckle like he would stroke a cat and for a while was lost in the silken feel of his skin. When he heard the rustling of fabric, he stepped back in horror as he saw the tips of Dorian’s shoulder blades emerge from the collar of Dorian’s shirt, unbuttoned and slid halfway down his back, like sails on an east horizon. He clasped Dorian’s arm, preventing him from removing his shirt any further. He swallowed with some difficulty.

“Dorian,” said Basil. “You don’t-- You don’t need to do that.”

“Do you not want me to? I assumed since you said you would like to examine my body that would like to see it in its entirety. It would be easier for you, I believe, if you did not have to grope through layers of clothing to get the knowledge you require. I don’t mind in the slightest. It’s not any more than I remove when I see my physician.” Dorian turned his head as far as he could and looked at Basil through the corner of his eye. “I’d do anything if I felt it pleased you.”

Struck, Basil nodded stiffly and drew the shirt away from Dorian’s body, folding it and putting it aside. When he returned to Dorian’s back he couldn’t help himself from placing the palms of his hands flat against the vast plane of skin before him and feeling the heat of the morning pass between them. All the wind went out of him.

“Dorian, you are enchanting,” he breathed. Embarrassed, Dorian began to pull away. Basil threw his arms around him and pressed him to his chest. “You can’t leave that easily. We have so much still to do.”

Basil, his nose buried in Dorian’s hair, smelled warm lavender. How perfect was this moment, this day? A million, million angels couldn’t bring him the same pure jubilation with their silver harps. He wished for the moment never to end, for it to stretch on and on until the sun went cold and the seas sweetened and a child was born that could obscure the beauty of his muse. None of it he could say out loud, but he passed the thoughts through his skin to Dorian and a corps of gooseflesh rippled across his chest.

“You fluster me terribly,” Dorian said. “I have been standing still for the last hour and yet my heart beats like I have run from a fiend. How you are able to select the correct hue for painting my face when you make it change colour so often I don’t understand. I cause so much trouble for you.”

“Never. You are the singular joy in my life. You are as faultless as a saint in my eyes.” He tendered the urge to praise kisses on his neck. He spread his hands over Dorian’s ribs like birds exhibiting plumage, feeling the delicacy of his lungs swell and deflate behind their cage of ivory. And, to his delight, resting before him was the object of his desire. Small and round, Dorian’s buttocks fit perfectly into the cleft of Basil’s thighs.

“Basil,” Dorian said softly, ”that’s blasphemy.” And Basil drew away. He did not want Dorian to feel how his hands trembled. “To compare a mortal to one of our heavenly guides…. A vicar would be most fearsome if he heard.”

Basil let out a silent sigh of relief. 

“Ah, yes. I will try to watch my tongue in the future.”

The bones and muscles in Dorian’s back shifted as he adjusted his footing. “Will you continue?”

Eagerly, Basil descended on his back: cupping his scapula, smoothing his thumbs down the seam of his spine, each vertebrae a petit Matterhorn for his fingers to scale. His back was like the beaches Basil had once idled upon during his voyage in the Maldives, tracts of milk white sand rolling to the horizon. Freckles or nevus spots did not make an appearance along his skin. The hair on his body was as blond as that on his head, though it countered in sparseness and sheerness. Scaled with the littlest plates as the snake’s body, the layered architecture of skin glimmered with every shift and shiver like a wave hooking the light until weakness brought it back to the broth of the sea.

It was easy, when he couldn’t see his face, to quell his desire, to imagine the body before him was an objective model and not the idol of his nightly yearnings. Unknowingly, with one hand, he played with the fastenings on his own shirt. Palm against everything was not sufficient as everything against everything. He wanted to see all God had to offer when he had made Dorian. If he could not touch him in a way other than perfect chastity, he at least wanted to hold the true image in his mind as the boy ravished him in his most intimate fantasies.

He pressed closer as his hands made the trek around to Dorian’s chest; they felt the birdlike construction of clavicle and sternum, and (Basil allowed himself this harmless indulgence) traced for a trice his nipples, rosebud soft and tabular on his bosom, on their way to puzzle out the svelte musculature of his belly.

“Oh!” Dorian gasped; his backside thrust into Basil. 

“You haven’t,” he said, answering the question Basil had yet to pose. “It didn’t hurt; it… I’m not sure what it did. I felt rather a charge through my body.”

“Not an unpleasant one, I hope.” Basil left his hands folded over Dorian’s navel.

Dorian shook his head, and his hair breezed by Basil’s nose like a cloud of perfume. “Not at all. If I were a poet, an artist like you, I might be able to describe it after one go, but already the feeling fades. You might do it again so it is fresher in my memory.”

“Do what again, Dorian?” He didn’t not mean to tease. He was baffled. Was this a dream? Could it be true that his own muse wanted to be touched in a place of lovers?

“If you could… Your fingers… If you were to pass them over my chest again, I could tell you of that feeling you caused in me.” The heat of bashfulness grew heavy against his shirtfront. Basil tucked his chin on Dorian’s shoulder and ruffled his hair, providing an aestival current.

“My fingers? Your chest?” He grazed the channel at the center of his chest.

“Don’t make me say it.” Dorian’s voice was weak like the rasped call of a crake.

Bending to his plea, Basil slid a finger into his own mouth and, once it was good and wet, played over Dorian’s nipple. A bud grew beneath his finger. 

The gasp Dorian emitted was birdsong, soft as grass. Basil bottled the sound in his memory to revisit for years to come, but now he had to focus on not collapsing at the force of their bodies connecting. 

“Yes-- Yes! That’s it! Oh my….” 

Dorian spun around and clasped Basil’s hands. “It was - I can speak on it so clearly - it’s like when you put a gold chain around your throat, a chain that’s cold from disuse and sends an abundance of chills throughout your body with shock and love. I must explore it later.”

“You will?” Basil’s voice cracked unexpectedly; the image of Dorian in the dim of his bedchamber making love to his nipples, going wild with newfound ecstasy, caused a rain of perspiration to burst forth on his upper lip. 

“If I can find the time, I shall. I delight in research. Your excursions into Anatomy do fascinate me, and I would love it if you were to lecture me on what you have gleaned from your study. Perhaps I could perform the same attentions on yourself.”

“I would certainly appreciate that,” Basil said, uncertain, shaking Dorian’s hands off.

“Wonderful,” said Dorian with his smile of gentle joy. “Would you like to take to my legs now? The weather isn’t so cold that I would be uncomfortable. Your hands are warm.”

Basil was too struck by the compliment to move. For many sessions Dorian had recoiled from his touch, remarking his hands had the quality of ice. 

Dorian’s legs emerged like two silver lances from bandaged leather and he stood bare, like a dream, in Basil’s studio.

“It was hot to-day,” was Dorian’s only explanation to his lack of underclothes.

Basil raked his gaze across Dorian’s bare body, surprised that no fuschia lines were left from the savagery with which he stared. He was gratified to see his nipples still bloomed, like lotuses on lilypads, resting on a lake dyed white by the dusk. Letting himself memorise as much of this fantasy as was possible, he shut his eyes and dug his nails deep into the flesh of his arm and, expecting the gorgeous youth to have slipped away, was overjoyed to see he was stayed on the platform.

Where his bloodless cock lay in the crease of his slender thighs, emerging from a ruff of threadlike gold, Basil averted his gaze and instead plunged to his knees. Since Dorian was of true flesh he could not touch him with desire. As much as his hands wandered voluptuously, he tried to keep his animalistic urges in check. 

He petted Dorian’s toes, the small silvery hairs that grew on his ankles, the bones that conspicuously sloped across the tops of his feet. His toenails gleamed, completely immaculate. There were no rough patches on his heel nor on the side of his largest toe which showed he had never taken on activities more strenuous than strolling through rose and peony gardens nor that he hadn’t the fastidiousness of aesthetic hygiene. Basil slid his hand from where he cupped a blessed ankle, no wider than the capital of a candlestick, to the cavern secreted behind his knee which was as moist and obscure as a lady’s exclusive organ, luxuriating in the sweep of polished calf.

Hair was present on Dorian’s lower half in more abundance than on his arms but it was light as the hair on his head and very sparse, congealing mostly above his cock. And so soft as well, like letting the flocculent obelisks of wheat caress your palm while you traipse in the countryside. Basil wished to discover if Dorian’s buttocks was flecked with the same shimmery down.

Rising as he went, Basil’s hands travelled up the outskirts of Dorian’s legs until they rested on his slim hips. If he wasn’t vigilant in keeping them there they would surely spill off the shelf of hip bone and congregate in the secreted gulf before his balls.

He trembled as he imagined what it would feel like to take Dorian’s balls in his fingers, to test their heft, their weight, how they sprung back into place after being disrupted by emptying, how prominent the suture would be when they were taut, the texture of them. Oh the texture! The velour of old leather with the elasticity of young skin was such a combination to make a man, even one still in the spring of his years, go loopy with excitement.

Were he as morally bankrupt as Henry, Basil might try to grope Dorian without warning or justification. His goal was to keep Dorian as apathetic as if he was being examined by a doctor. Basil knew it was only in his wildest dreams that the youth would respond with fire and red-faced lust and so resolved to prevent the scale from tipping too far to disquiet.

“Basil?”

“Yes, Dorian,” Basil said, feigning nonchalance.

“You’ve been at my hips for a while.”

“Oh, I apologise.” 

Quick as a hare, Basil pulled his hands away only for Dorian to call out incoherently, seize upon his wrists and draw him back to his former placement.

“To-day you are skittish as a leaf in a gale. I haven’t yet said one word to reproach your touch but still you perceive I am in agony and wish to be free from you. I can tell you that isn’t the case. Merely, my intention was to-- You could move on if you like. To my other parts.” He ducked his head and blushed. “If--if you wished, that is. If you found it necessary to your study.”

Basil could hardly get a word out, the bliss of not one but both of his hands interposed between tracks of Dorian’s warm skin was driving him to mute distraction.

“I don’t wish to be indecent.”

“You wouldn’t be! I have no qualms against it. I must be inspected there on occasion for my health and have yet to be scandalised.”

“Are you sure?” Basil was increasingly hesitant. Although he was envious of whatever profession had the blessing to touch Dorian in his most intimate places, that envy was beggarly to the pressure of the choice before him. For his life, however short it had been, Basil was one who would sooner avoid chances so the regret of having committed a sin or crime would not hang around his neck forevermore like the albatross of poetical legend.

“Yes, you silly boy,” Dorian cried and forced Basil’s hands diagonally until his knuckles brushed against his cock.

It took everything in Basil not to retreat, stealing himself against the jolt of excitement that hit him like a fist to the belly. 

Gently as he could manage, Basil slid his index finger lengthwise across Dorian’s soft cock, ignoring the jolly burstings in his mind, the pure jubilation that made the mere observations a pyrite. The pink glans peeped out from where it was cloaked by a tawny hood. Briefly, though it may have been a trick of the light, Basil thought he saw a bead of moisture gleam on the opening.

“For an artist you are so very prudish sometimes. Surely you must have seen hoards of nude models in your classes,” Dorian said boldly.

“I’ve never touched any before,” Basil murmured and looked into Dorian’s eyes. Dorian coloured a little but squared his shoulders to continue.

“I only thought that-- as a part of the body-- My stance is-- is _affected_ , in its own way, by the size and occasional tumescence of that, well, that part of my body and as well it might be prudent to understand a figure in all of its aspects in order to conjure it against a canvas. Even when only fashioning a bust, one must give consideration to the legs in order for the whole positioning and paused gait to be gleaned. By-- Oh, dear…”

Whilst Dorian blundered through his monologue, Basil stroked along his cock. Using only the backs of his fingers, he tried to be as innocuous as a cat brushing against an ankle as he took in the sensations slowly, avoiding the strong temptation to take Dorian in his fist and pump madly until his balls were parched and flinching.

Since to do so would be tantamount to rape, Basil contented himself with letting his flattened knuckles taste the flimsy skin that lay taut across the narrow peaks of his pelvic bone like a bolt of silk over the backs of two chairs underneath which Hebrew maidens play at nuptials.

Dorian was as white as the skeleton that has had its bones washed and purified for exhibition in a science classroom; it was just as well the svelteness of his body made it simple to witness the elegant processes of life performed under his skin which on occasions became nearly translucent when it caught the light at a particular angle, glittering like the wings of a beetle.

That distinct sort of light was falling through the window, and Basil, viewing Dorian with ceaseless adoration, could not help the gravity that drew his hand from the cool chastity of hip basin to the heated urgency of clutching cock. 

“To get the fuller picture,” Basil defended weakly. His heart was grown to such an immense size it made breathing a tribulation.

Dorian nodded, transfixed by the connexion of their bodies.

Basil did not stroke as he would a lover, the gripping slick motion to achieve ejaculation, but rather like a friend, had such acts been commonplace between mere friends, for he held Dorian loosely, the most sensitive aspect of his hand drinking in the texture like a Sapphic honeybee in the yonic shaped embrace of an orchid. Wishfully, he thought the penis had increased in size since it had first been unveiled, but it was only in his imagination that this was true.

Breath came harder than it had even when he saw Dorian bare his chest for the first time as his palm swept over the length of his cock, drawing apart the curtain of foreskin and disrobing the ripe limit which was bright and soft as a summer stream.

The urge to wash his hand in saliva and wrap Dorian in a lubricious heaven, tugging like a country mistress on a sprung bell, ravenous after the poverty of dream senses, was overwhelming. The effluvium of a pub to a half-recovered ale fiend, ultraviolence to Monet.

But he kept the touch dry and scientific.

Reluctant as Eos to leave the starry arms of Astraeus, Basil then removed his touch from Dorian’s cock to migrate to his greatest prize. 

The position Basil had to perform in order to hold the two spheres of Dorian’s buttocks brought close together their groins, a proximity not unlike a painting on a wall. Thankful for the years of practice in suppressing and concealing erections, Basil felt confident as his hold tightened, the soft flesh rolling under his palms. 

“Basil?”

“Yes, Dorian?” He had gotten rather lost in the boy’s eyes, a wonderful Mediterrannen blue, and when Dorian looked away, the spell between them was rather broken.

“Perhaps, for a better view I mean, you should stand behind me.”

“Oh yes. Yes, of course.” 

He dropped his hands and moved around Dorian and knelt until he had a sight full of Dorian’s pale buttocks. Not pale in the sickly tubercular way but like a fresh veil of sun-warmed snow upon a field of grass. Though it had only been moments since he had touched them, Basil had to take pause to admire the exquisite curve that began somewhat below his tailbone and tapered at his strong legs. 

Basil laid a finger at the top and, hardly touching more than the hair, followed the arc slowly and, when he reached the bottom, Dorian shivered in such convulsions that Basil was terrified he had done something egregious.

“I haven’t, have I?” Basil asked worriedly.

“Never in a million years. It’s only… Just a new sensation to me, to be touched in a way so gently there. I don’t mind terribly. It’s only that it's different.”

“So you won’t mind if I continue?”

“No,” said Dorian, and Basil thought he detected evidence of pink in his voice.

Basil began his caresses at Dorian’s flank, moving inward, almost disappointed there was no particular imperfection that Basil could preserve in his mind as proof this had happened, that it wasn’t confined to a wishful dreamscape. But no: Dorian was irrefutably flawless.

What a gentle grade! Like wind-designed dunes, he was soft and humped, the only sand-styled dimples were the invisible follicles that gifted such fluid patterns to his skin.

On a sojourn in Hong Kong to study the application of ink in painting, Basil read of the various classical gods and legend of the Old Man of the South and how he owned a peach that would grant immortality to one who ate from it. Were he to feast on the peach Dorian wore Basil would doubtlessly have his life doubled in joy if not length. 

Dorian’s posterior was not quite the hue of a peach but Basil would have loved making it so with great spanking and pinching until Dorian was weak with delight then molding cold salves into those two great mounds of flesh until they returned to their wintery cast. Basil’s heart, never tranquil since Dorian doffed his shirt, was particularly restive, moving in vibration more than a beating.

Like all drupes, there was a stone of pleasure concealed within the thick pulp that Basil longed to gain but, as the Hope Diamond was, it was a jewel not to be touched. 

He longed to press his cheek against the softness or just to feel the barest hint of it brush his skin as cheeks do when chaste lovers pull apart from their embrace. He wanted to drink from Dorian like a hummingbird drinks from a violet, to put his lips on Dorian’s lips like they were the rim of a glass and drink from him, to take him in his mouth and suck on him the way one would a sweet. 

With careful hands, Basil parted Dorian’s buttocks, the bud that lay between them revealed like a bride from behind her veil. Dorian shivered at the sudden rush of air. 

The private space between Dorian’s buttocks did not have the same robust temper as his arms or legs, instead being of gelatinous quality and was exceedingly warm. 

Basil, his finger poised like an eagle about to swoop, glanced up at the great column of Dorian’s spine to see if it was in any way disrupted by the youth turning his head or bunched with nerves of discomfort. No agitation was present although the pearls of gooseflesh had cascaded down his back like the foam of a waterfall.

The first touch against Dorian’s most intimate part was like tasting heaven. Basil felt the sensation travel from the pad of his finger to melt on the surface of his tongue

Small wrinkles signed Dorian as naturally as seed pods spangled a dandelion’s scalp. Basil led the pliable skin as he swept his kind finger along the juncture of Dorian’s posterior, where the skin was pink, not white, and provided the most exciting reaction of Dorian’s yet.

The backs of his knees shook when Basil passed along the precise arena of excitement and breath fled from his lips at a tremulous and paced rhythm like the vibrato of a clavichord, billowing humility into the spring wind.

“Basil,” Dorian sighed when Basil exerted a pressure along him, “would you care to linger lower? It’s only the most delightful of sparks burst inside of me when you do. Deep from within my marrow, I feel… I cannot be certain of its spiritual origin as I am assured of its physical genesis at...well I won’t be specific, but you know of what I speak.” 

Dorian had his chin turned to his chest in a posture of contrition. Were there a way in etiquette Basil could share his feelings, to soothe him into the knowledge his request would be granted with joy, he would have recited the spell as fluently as Hecate of the saffron robe. 

“I do,” Basil said, disbelief resplendent in his body as blood. “And you do enjoy it?”

 _“Yes_. Get on with it.” Dorian sounded so forceful, and Basil obeyed without a second thought, circling.

Basil leant forward, his cheek against Dorian’s hip and saw something he had to blink at several times before he understood what he was looking at. No longer did Dorian’s cock hang limp as a crystal stalactite off a chandelier but rather pointed skyward, stiff as an icicle, though in a form much hotter. 

The sense of reality that habited Basil’s mind spun like a globe. “Dorian, are you erect?”

On his heel, Dorian propelled himself to where his cock was pointing in Basil’s favour.

Basil had only seconds to take in the sight, so very close as to be his own nose, before he let his gaze rise to Dorian’s face. He had positioned his chin very highly from his chest and was looking at the wall, his cheeks knotted with tension.

Basing his actions off what had so recently occurred, Basil mustered his courage to move his face forward to Dorian’s cock, his lips pursed, and put a kiss on the shaft, so light that if Basil was induced to speak of the event he would have to admit he, his lips, felt nothing. As brief as the light beam that glances off the butter knife at break-fast. But while the physical sensation was absent Basil’s heart was seized in a fist of pure fire, releasing ripples of euphoria through his body.

He craved more. 

Basil opened his mouth and slipped the head of Dorian’s cock inside, almost immediately a bittersweet liquor lined the caps of his taste buds, more delicious than the finest champagnes of France. He suckled like a butterfly on an aster bloom, tempting the spring to flow as freely as Gihon did through Eden. 

Hands entered the shrubbery of his locks, enclosing on the curls, as Dorian’s cock moved further into Basil’s mouth without Basil having to so much as nod his head. Basil felt as if the penis was piercing too far through his head and triggering an unconquerable delirium within the confines of his mind which would then glut his organs, his blood, the very marrow of his bones with a bliss that could never be replicated. The little devil in his mouth danced at the touch of its partner, the much-admired at terpsichorean craft tongue, a rogue at Roger de Coverly, a wonder at waltz, and a much sought after mate for schottische, heating at the whirling round the palate, perspiration, tasting of the sea, spurting from widened pores.

“Oh, Basil!”

The wild deluge overfilled his mouth as Dorian spent down his throat. Basil swallowed and was standing in time to collect the swooning Dorian from a fall.

“Easy now. Easy now boy. Come, let’s sit.”

Limping with his arm over Basil’s neck, the arm flaccid as a scarf, Dorian was helped to the chaise longue at the far end of the studio, below a window so that he might feed on the sunlight like the primrose he was. Once Dorian was arranged, Basil fetched him a glass of water to revive him. As he was being watered, Basil felt for a fever and though his chest was flushed a darling shade of pink, there was no malady to report; he was as healthy as a sprightly colt. 

Drops of water gushed from either side of the glass, Dorian imbibing the drink as an old man would guzzle that mythic Floridian libation, drops that coursed from his chin and rained on his chest, drops that Basil would have very much liked to lick off. 

“Are you alright?” he asked, casting his fingers through Dorian’s hair, barely moistened by perspiration. 

Instead of responding, Dorian set down the glass - the crystals snagging the light, a golden net like the one Hephestus wove to shame the lusts of cuckoldry - and his eyes dipped into Basil’s like hands into a cool oasis. His true hands stretched from his shy lap, five pointed stars they were, and folded over onto the mound cowering beneath Basil’s trousers, tepid in climate but still felt through the layer of moleskin. 

“Dorian, I-”

“You can use this?”

Ignorant to a nuanced response, Basil choked out a, “Yes, but-”

The grip around his cock tightened. 

“Will you?”

And Basil was immolated to his desire.

Dorian had no idea what was to happen as Basil grasped his thin arms and surged him to the headboard of the chaise. Basil hardly knew himself. As they were nose to nose, Basil’s cock pressing into the tender skin of Dorian’s thigh, they breathed heavily, gazes dizzily jumping from eye to eye yet never quite meeting. 

Well, if Dorian wanted a good rogering, who was Basil not to oblige him?

He turned Dorian onto his stomach, the shoulder blades moved toward one another in a microcosm of steeling oneself, and moved down his body until he made the reacquaintance with the unbloomed rosebud of anus clandestine to Dorian’s bottom. Hours could have been spent admiring that organic jewel but his plans were of an enlightenment more intimate than sight. 

Basil declined his head until it was parallel with the squinting eye that was winking with anticipation and, to gratify its covetous hunger, he granted his tongue liberation where it went to its task at once like a convict paroled, frantic to reclaim the happiness of revelry so long held afar. 

The tongue swept its flat over the hole, a susurration of melody emerged between the tongue and the rim before the fifedom of bright cries by the avenue of Dorian’s throat outshone it twentyfold.

The taste was piquant in its profile but knowing whose flavour it was transfigured the bitterness into something sweet and heady as brandy. That Basil was kissing this pair of lips before he chanced to the partnership that exposed such tremulous and curious organs as tongue and brain enchanted his baser lecheries. Witches on hailing their Abbadon - jubilant, their cheeks fiery with triumph - would approach him on their knees and part the drapes of his infernal flesh to cede a kiss on the womb all woes. This bedeviling of a kiss, when placed conventionally was a sanctified apportionment among pew-dwellers, had wrecked horror on a younger Basil, swaddled with shadows in the wine-cellar of a babyhood playmate, and the first time an acquaintance at a club expressed the deed in a romantic sense, Basil was almost put out (could his one escape from amorous perfidy really be a front for Satanic worship; his mother had once been invited to a women’s prayer group that had in actuality been a consortium for spirit conjuring) until that acquaintance offered to demonstrate and the sensations derived were the tickling of his every nerve with the feathers of angels, and certainly there were folk who would still believe it a blasphemy but Basil could not fathom how an act he was performing with endless reference, with love, could be used to degrade, to insult the very Creator whose perfect Creation he was galvanizing with his own talents as so wrought by the same Creator.

He folded his tongue into the cone of a whistle and by penetrating, at last!, the liminal chastity of their encounters implored a song to twitter out of his silver flute. In the manner of copulation, he thrust his tongue into the warm center of Dorian’s bum and fluttered it along the fleshly passage. The buttocks leapt and wriggled in reflection, an attached leg paddled on the velvet of the chaise and Basil took hold of the unruly ankle, palpating down the sole until he came to the perfect little toes, plump blueberry tips curled up and shy. How Basil would have liked to licked them straight. 

Furnished lovingly with wet, the hole shimmered like an aureole of tender light but, as much as Basil longed to push into that exquisite arena of pleasure, to mount the back of the kelpie and have that sable stallion drag him into the waters, he knew what would be his delight would heft suffering onto Dorian. As damp as he was, he was just as tight as the toe of a new boot and like a boot would need stretching before anything could conceivably fit comfortably inside. And Basil knew just the instrument to use.

He sucked on his center finger and put it down to the cheeks, sliding outlines of circles as he had done earlier, massaging until the brief leap of tension was smoothed into a languid stillness. Then, when he considered Dorian accustomed to the idea, he began his invasion.

A finger well greased plunged into the hole and was encased in heat, the pulpy interior tightened around like the fist of a bandit on a particularly precious chain. Inside, Basil rummaged for the star within Dorian’s bum that would, when the finger-gale parted the nebulas of pain, flare brighter than Sirius and seek out gratification as a hound’s snout picks the choicest bloods in the hunt. 

Dorian released a moan that seemed hauled from the very depths of his belly. He was a restive lad, a chevalier couldn’t have rode into battle with the same zeal as Dorian thrust his body downward onto the finger. And as he became disciplined to strong Esau, clever Jacob stole in under a leaf of withdrawal and the twins cavorted within Dorian’s bum. 

When Basil discovered there was room enough for a triplet of digits, he stole all three away. 

He laid a hand on Dorian’s arm and assisted him in turning over. His cock was a blushing hue, flat on his belly and faintly damp, a paralyzed comet in all its trailing splendour caught in its revolution past Venus. Basil unhooked the fastenings of his trousers and slid the article down so his cock was at last sprung from where it had clawed and pleaded for play. Having accumulated a puddle of saliva in his hand, he applied the lubricant to his cock, polishing the tool to a sheen to rival the dome of St Paul’s. Bronze foreskin gathered and bunched as he spread the water along his phallus but because the threat of spewing the seed in his bollocks while regarding his boy - framed by the plum cushion like the albedo of a pomegranate packed tight with the covenant of Plutonian coral; women should not be portrayed as the sole prey of baiting berries - was so intense, he collected his fingers at the root and held the urge there with barbaric anticipation.

Beholding Basil’s appendage - it was of boastful size, swarthy as a Welshman’s or perhaps a Spaniard’s from days spent reprieved from frock coat and breeks on the sands of Dieppe, the stalwart trunk of a tree, the tip twinkling, a sparkle of anticipation blossoming on the cleft - Dorian rearranged himself on the chaise, taking a somewhat upright position, his back the hypotenuse to the seat and the back of the chaise, his bottom offered like a persimmon with a segment cleft from its body, the rescuing midst latent to Basil.

His old knees whimpered as his crouched before the altar of Adonis, a morsel of honey wept from the opening of his cock which was alight like a votive candle, all for Dorian whose face was wan with the weakness that asserts itself when its host is casualty to the most extreme pleasures. With his drier hand, shaking as it was, Basil held Dorian’s pale cheek, thumbing the skin there back to its robust loveliness while the dear thing rested before the cumulative pleasure was enacted. 

The maw of his cock, slobbering as overswelled thundercloud, loosened the slot of Dorian’s buttocks and Basil was tickled at the fluency by which he claimed Dorian, an unctuous glide of such acceleration that Basil found himself fully sheathed the instant after he applied the tip.

Accustomed to such contained bearings, the squeeze around him was not a revelation but being inside Dorian had even muscle along his body contract with emotion. They were nose to nose again. His blues were luminous as the sky.

Plunged into Dorian, Basil was sure he would not need to move to ejaculate, just beholding the boy and thinking could lead to the path of little death. 

The sultry vise motivated calefaction to strangle every nerve along his skin. A grove of perspiration broke upon his lip.

His knees in an insalubrious position, he lifted himself slightly, for his own comfort, only to excite a high gasp in his beloved. Dorian snatched his eyes from the light, the eyelids striped with faint lines and perverse with agitation, the marbles underneath swirling. He threw his arms around Basil’s neck and held the artist chest to chest. Basil, obeying, thrust again.

WIth every jerk or lift of his hips, a note or two were cajoled from Dorian, which on further expressions of his body, Basil was able to seduce them into a continuous melody. 

He drove his rod deeper into his partner, reaching for his mark, the site where he had attracted the most pleasure. A less delicate and precise system he executed, but one where the site was given perpetual consideration, where the site expanded along the entirety of the interior until the smallest adjustment had Dorian fumbling for immobility on Basil’s collar, just a slip of Basil’s thumb down the track of his spine made him clench and quiver.

Dorian enjoyed hands of stouter tenacity than a man of his proportions would be estimated to own and with those hands he clung to Basil and begged for the rod inside to broach greater distances. Pleasure alone was his ultimatum.

His white legs were a lasso around Basil’s middle, capturing and directing the bullish impulses that assailed his bottom. Even grunting like a bull, Basil tossed his hair and bowed his clear vision over Dorian, hoeing out the obfuscating soil of ecstasy to exhume the diamond of true emotion, yet the heavenly expression he admired fled into his throat as Dorian hid himself against Basil’s shirt. 

Unwilling to allow Dorian to feel a modicum of shame, Basil pulled his head up and dove into his neck, open mouthed like he was caught in the midst of reciting that elliptic vowel of pleasure and was it not titanic pleasure to be connected with Dorian like this?

Of all the times he had been united with a man, never had he felt such a synergy between his heart and his body, delivering pleasure to his love by way of his body and powering his body, powering his love by way of his heart, a unison pumping, a celebratory vehemence accumulating with each strike of bollocks against the incredible apricotlike buttocks like a hoplite crashing his spear along the ruddy facade of his scutum.

Basil had made love and been made love to before and knew the first moments of intercourse were like throwing oneself into a quantity of snow with the first experiences those of hysteria then impaling pain, but once one tarried for better weather, one found a warmth that devoured all senses and slowly drew one into a perfect death of a thousand colours. 

He adored it all. The hysteria, the pain, the glory of the warmth like the fires of the stars, giving it, having it bestowed upon him, but all memory of previous lovemaking had the force of singular snowflake to the smothering that copulation with Dorian engendered. 

The very roots of his hair seemed to be ablaze as he fed upon the elegance of Dorian’s neck, kissing the longitude from the cut of his jaw to the jut of his collarbone. Basil’s phallus was roundly wedged inside and he drew it without and plunged it back within several times, casting forward his hips as if he were set upon a rowdy stallion, almost no control was afforded to his movements, they simply were performed by the necessity of his circumstances. His phallus beamed with sensation.

The fit was so precise his cock might have been the petit pied of Cendrillon to Dorian’s excellently crafted slipper. Around him, Dorian’s bottom squeezed and roiled and even when he retreated to commit greater voluptuousness upon him, the bottom sucked him back up greedily. 

The plurality of thrusts increased to a rate that even the pretty twittering of Dorian’s windpipe was scorched into nothing more than silent hiccoughs but the vitality of his hands kept Basil at his battering duty. The rapacious bum around him held with a steadfastness that was kin to administration by many mouths on the totality of his cock.

Then a more deliberate squeeze and Basil knew Dorian was reaching the pinnacle of desire. A perception not unlike the contumely of honeybees was disheveling his nerves as he galloped down on Basil’s cock and tore his mouth from his neck and connected their gazes as if looking for assurance that this luxury wasn’t the counterfeit rapture of dreams.

Dorian seized him as he suffered through his culmination. The milk of lust dripped downwards and onto the bed of hair around his phallus like seed pearls on an Elizabethan ruff of golden lace. If he could preserve Dorian in this position, he would create a diaphanous study of the delicacy before him. 

Now that Dorian had been romanced to expiration, Basil would remove himself, allow his innards to relax back into their previously compact arrangement, yet when he had taken his glans from the sanctuary of Dorian’s bum, a hand, overeager, clamped on the root of his cock. Dorian’s eyes, though still bearing the overgrown water of orgasm, were lucid, and the boy aligned Basil’s cock back to his hole.

The triumph was building on him as rain fills a rim-high river, each segment of the clouds toppling the balance of the perfectly contained liquid until it all crashes into the open. Conscientious to any discomfort he could be afflicting upon Dorian, he expressed his thrusts briefly. The sensation was mostly unnecessary: the image of Dorian ordering his cock back inside him, the penumbra of touch still residing on his pillar, drove him past the border of sanity. Jet after jet of fiery sperm decamped from Basil’s testicles into Dorian’s posterior, taking with them the remainder of energy Basil had within his body. 

He dismissed himself from Dorian’s body, folding to his knees and returning his penis to its seat within his trousers in the boat of his swaying hands. 

The blissful smile on his lips vanished when his view lunged upon Dorian’s eyes which, though before only coloured with the tints of the ocean, were now teeming with water. Basil leapt to his feet and went to enfold Dorian in an embrace but was shunted by a pair of strong arms.

“My dear boy. My dear, dear boy,” Basil murmured, apart. Distance deplorable.

“Don’t speak to me in that way. You are far too tender to a creature like me.” 

“You’re an angel.” He tried for him again and this time Dorian relented, collapsing into Basil’s chest like a pilgrim upon the open sands of Jerusalem. On Basil’s loose white lapels, Dorian’s hands curled tightly, unknowingly parting the sides further and when he pressed his forehead on Basil’s breastbone, the artist’s pulse nudged his mind insistently.

“You mustn’t talk of me like that. I’ve committed a grave injustice against you. There’s been nothing but goodwill and fellowship from you to me and I have spoiled it with corruption.”

“You haven’t, you haven’t.”

“Why haven’t you thrown me out? It would be well within your rights to do so and I would not fault you for it; I would not think you cruel.”

“Because I do not wish to be parted from you. Dorian, you have been my sole gladness since we met. A day, a moment, without you doubles in length and its joy is halved without you to share it with. Should I order you to leave I would hope you would not obey.”

Dorian wept gently, obscuring his face against Basil's chest. Basil kissed what he could reach, the downy bright hair beneath his lips was like a kiss returned. Basil took Dorian’s head between his hands and pried him from his hiding place until he could see his face, raw from tears, stained with distress. His heart mourned the sight.

Comfort he knew to give by the office of an elder born, nursing wounds bodily and spiritual of his younger brother was a nature that came even ahead of painting and barrelled from his soul on viewing a face inflamed with tears. Raising his sleeve, he dried Dorian and noted how sweetly he complied, inclining his head towards the cloth and keeping steady. 

He embraced Dorian quickly and, brushing his hair clear from his cheeks, asked: “Would you like to put your clothes back on?”

Untamed nigh instantly, Dorian moved backwards, his visage coalescing into outrage which blew out the gentle flame lit upon Basil’s heart.

“And why,” said Dorian, his voice still wiggling with tearfulness, “should you want me to do that? Basil, I have just-- You have proclaimed you aren’t-- That you haven’t been put out by my state and yet you ask me to cover up. What would be gained in hiding behind clothes, behind propriety? Do you intend on forgetting for the sake of, I don’t know, continuing our friendship? As if our friendship could carry on with an unspoken secret hanging above us like some kind of Sword of Damocles. If you want me to go, ask me to go; don’t use my goodwill towards you as a way to humiliate me further.”

“I only thought you’d be more comfortable,” Basil said, the only words he was able to utter. 

Dorian began to stutter. “Basil, this room is warm enough as it is without wearing clothes. Basil, please don’t change the subject. Basil-” Dorian walked to the far end of the studio and sat down on the raised platform, a subject of the first water. When he swung his head back to Basil, he was almost contrite. “Don’t make me leave.”

Basil flew to Dorian. For a third time, he could not resist wrapping the boy in his arms. “Oh Dorian,” he said to the air, imitating the start of an epic poem. Dorian, the tenth muse and only brother. “You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said to you. For a man of your virtues you can be wildly insecure sometimes. I love you. Not despite what you have done, not with strings or stipulations or any sort of wretched things as those, and most certainly not without every part of my being. My love only stipulates you be the incomparable that I have known, that I have loved, since the day we were first introduced and I beheld in you the consummation of my life’s long inquiry.” 

“Oh, Basil. Mr Hallward,” Dorian murmured towards Basil’s heart.

“Mr Grey! Mr Grey, let me love you. Let me love you, Dorian, sans tempests and fear.”

“Yes. Love me, Basil, love me.”

“My dear boy!” Basil clutched Dorian to his body. 

Every silver of joy inside him ran together in fine streams that gathered into luminescent rivers that emptied into the bottomless ocean of his love; splashes of colour, lemon, amaranth, sapphire, reached to empyrean heights; a brilliant fecundity of happiness peopled the avenues of his future. 

Dorian was smooth and beautiful against him. 

Reluctantly, Basil parted slightly with his beloved. Those eyes.

“Dorian, may I kiss you?”

“I disown whatever I’ve done to make you think you need to ask.”

Basil slid his hands around Dorian’s face as if he was cupping a dram of aqua vitae and brought the gorgeous concoction to his lips.

Their lips opened underneath one another’s, uniting their bodies in an organization Basil found more intimate than the concord of their nether parts. They could not communicate with such facile objects as words. Their love had to be published in the variant known only by their prelapsarian ancestors until their folly gifted them with the unlimited fruits of the body. 

Basil spoke with the press of his tongue. All he had confessed of his love he declared more perfectly with his mouth quartered. His kiss was Montaigne, was Virgil, was the poetry of the Gospels compared with the feuilleton he could ever muster out of his throat. And Dorian’s tongue promised dazzling rhyme and rhetoric, lines and phrases of such ingenious configuration that the saintly Bard would rend his folios in shame were he to hear the chime and euphony of Dorian’s selfless love. 

His lips were better than Basil had imagined them, silken as the driven snow and energetic; Basil needn’t exert all his skills to teach Dorian the craft of osculation.

When they were cleft by the unfortunate human devoir of breath, Basil was already overcome with prophecies of refreshment.

“Would you mind staying after brandy?”

“No, but I shall mind if I am made to sleep in a guest room.”


End file.
